September 2008 Blog Posts (44)

SmallParts.com is a pretty handy website for prototype builders - I stumbled across them when looking for nylon fasteners and found lots of other interesting stuff - gears, belts, cables, springs, bearings, shafts, tools, etc. Prices are reasonable, though freight is a bit expensive - it cost $8 to get $15 worth of parts via UPS, but otherwise, no complaints. In any case, the site is worth a visit.

Stanford computer scientists have developed an artificial intelligence system that enables robotic helicopters to teach themselves to fly difficult stunts by watching other helicopters perform the same maneuvers. The result is an autonomous helicopter than can perform… Continue

Doing traditional datalogging with Arduino is a pain. It only has 1k of RAM, and half of that is used by the program, so you can't store any significant data in its own memory. Meanwhile, writing to a SD card, as the Adafruit GPS logger does, takes pretty much all of its computational power, leaving little left for useful work. This is not unique to Arduino--it's true for any 8-bit embedded processor. You can add… Continue